So, as some of you might remember, we
set up a little side contest on Free Day:

As Mentioned on IRC, since we didn't get around to coming up with anything for
users of text-only browsers like Lynx, w3m, elinks, et al., IT will be running
a side contest with a handful of prizes. If you snailmail us a screenshot,
photograph, printout, or related proof of today's SparkFun home page loaded on
your terminal of choice, postmarked before the 20th, we'll choose one on the
basis of creativity and draw a couple more at random. Prizes to be determined.

We got a nice little pile of submissions - 14 in total - and I've been
telling people I would announce winners approximately twice a day since the
deadline.

Most recently, I told Emcee Grady I'd put something on the blog around 9am
on Wednesday. I'm only running a couple of hours late on that one.

Anyhow, I narrowed things down to half a dozen finalists and coerced everybody in IT
plus a few Customer Service reps to vote. The final winner was
Harford Hackerspace's snapshot of a dude
named Miles grimacing at an ADM-3A
with the Free Day home page clearly visible.

The two winners picked at random from the whole pool of entrants (ok, so at
pseudorandom):

Isaac from Oklahoma, using elinks.

Jasmine from California, who didn't quite follow instructions,
but who wrote a very nice letter and does have a terminal visible in
the screenshot, so I guess we'll let it slide.

I'm gonna post this before I disappoint our copywriter any more than I already
have - the man's got a regular schedule to uphold here - and update it in a bit
with some photos of the more interesting submissions. Thanks to everyone who sent
us mail - it was a lot of fun opening all those envelopes.

Winners: I'll be in touch with a promo code. We're just gonna call this equivalent
to a Free Day win because I'm way short of the energy to do anything more creative.

Next time you’d better use random.org, a true random number generator. You can even use an HTTP API to incorporate in php scripts if you do want to script something yourself. They’re using normalised cosmic background radiation from a radio receiver, much like the idea of Freeday with your Geiger counter :)

I wasn’t talking about Freeday, please do that your own way! I was talking about using php’s random function for the selection of these winners, vs. using truly random numbers for that. (Since it was even mentioned in the news post that you used a pseudorandom number.)

There are people like me that absolutely despise the ‘singing and dancing chipmunks’ syndrome that has taken over most web pages. The words do not dance around when reading a book, nor should they. Since the Internet is still mostly a reading medium, it should not try to mix in the animation of television. Singing and dancing chipmunks are like that ‘Shakesphere’ a few days ago. Cute for about 10 seconds, and then you just want to shoot the dang thing. Now excuse me while I attempt to delete Flash player, again.

Try getting Firefox and adding the add-on ‘Ad Block Plus’ and the ‘Element hiding helper for Ad Block Plus’ - I can’t believe how much more ‘peaceful’ it is to be on some sites now. :)

It leaves ‘still’ ads alone if you like and can easily be disabled for a particular site. You can easily select any annoying ad to have it blocked from then on. I’ve found it so much nicer since having it.

Some of us hate seeing 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Flash objects slowing down the page loading process while TRYING to check our stupid email because there might be something there without 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Flash objects.

I can’t tell you how irritated I was when I discovered that they don’t even put floppy connectors on motherboards any more.

Once upon a time, I had this digital camera which wrote directly to a built in floppy drive. I gave it to a friend of mine, who promptly hitchhiked to New Mexico and had it stolen along with his guitar and most of his clothes. I kind of miss it.

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